


the greatest vanishing trick of all

by StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese



Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, I swore one (1) time, POV of suicide, Religion, TW: Suicide, Time Travel, Trauma, enjoy i guess???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:34:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25685128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese/pseuds/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese
Summary: Mikkel Nielsen winds up in 1986, and nothing is ever the same.
Relationships: Hannah Kahnwald/Michael Kahnwald | Mikkel Nielsen, Jonas Kahnwald & Michael Kahnwald | Mikkel Nielsen
Comments: 14
Kudos: 45





	the greatest vanishing trick of all

Something had happened to Jonas’s dad, but nobody would tell Mikkel what.  
  
This was a source of endless frustration to him.  
  
He had never met Jonas’s father, aside from a single, very creepy, encounter inside a dark house, and as far as Mikkel knew, Jonas’s father had never been seen out in the town. Supposedly, he was a total recluse, and some of the kids at school snickered about it. Whatever had happened to Jonas’s father had happened right before Jonas’s vacation to France. He hoped Jonas had some cool stories to tell about the trip. He hadn’t realized Jonas knew French.  
  
When Magnus and Martha had been forced to take Mikkel on their trip to the woods with their friends one night after Jonas had returned, Mikkel had been thrilled. Maybe he could ask Jonas about his trip while Magnus and Martha were distracted.  
  
When he looked back on that night, later, he wished that he had run away, far, far away, the consequences be damned.  
  
When they got to the caves, in the middle of the woods, the older kids started arguing. They might have even started brawling, if not for that loud noise. It scared the others, and then Mikkel was running, and then Jonas was beside him, and then Jonas was _gone_.  
  
In the days following that night, Mikkel wished more than anything that he hadn’t stopped, that he hadn’t called out for Jonas, that he had just kept going and found his brother and sister instead.  
  
But he didn’t.  
  
And so Jonas found him.  
  
“Come on,” he said, and Mikkel grasped Jonas’s hand as they ran back towards the caves, and away from everything Mikkel had ever known.  
  
The thumping of Mikkel’s heart was loud in his ears, but with his hand in Jonas’s, nothing could hurt him.

* * *

Jonas was gone.  
  
Again.  
  
The first time had really seemed like an accident, but now…  
  
Mikkel had fallen asleep, and Jonas had been there, and now he was awake and Jonas was gone and Mikkel was definitely panicking.  
  
Had Jonas abandoned him?  
  
Why?  
  
Maybe something had happened to him. But why wouldn’t he have woken Mikkel up? Had Mikkel imagined Jonas leading him into the cave? Had he imagined the claustrophobic crawl through the stone tunnel? Surely not.  
  
Was it morning?  
  
His parents would be worried sick. He had to get home, quickly.  
  
Mikkel ran out of the caves, and headlong into his new life.

* * *

“Will I be stuck in 1986 forever?” he had asked Ines hopelessly, while he was still at the hospital, and she had given him that half-pitying, half-amused look he had come to hate. It meant she thought that either there was something wrong with him, or that he was joking, and if there was one thing he knew for sure, it was that he was not joking.  
  
“Of course not, silly,” she had replied, poking him in the stomach, and his heart had leapt– and then she went on, “in a few months, it’ll be 1987.”  
  
When Ines wasn’t looking, Mikkel cried.  
  
He was the only time traveller, ever, in the history of the earth, and he couldn’t even tell anybody about it. He had pulled off the greatest vanishing trick in the world, one that would make Houdini himself look on in awe.  
  
Of course, vanishing tricks were no good unless you could make the object reappear afterwards.

* * *

“Okay,” Ines said one day, in the indulgent tone that he hated, “If you’re from the future, how did you come here without causing the apocalypse? Seems like backwards time travel would certainly be the thing to trigger it, no?”  
  
“Easy,” Mikkel said. “It’s like that old movie, _Back to the Future_ , but if Marty never got to leave the fifties. I disrupted the timeline when I came to the past, because I was never meant to be here, and created a brand new one, and I’m the only one who remembers the old one.”  
  
“Old movie? Oh, Michael.” Ines smiled a little, and Mikkel remembered too late that the movie had only come out in 1985. “So, think of it this way: is the world you came from gone now, like the family in the movie?”  
  
Mikkel felt his brain go still.  
  
His first instinct was denial: it wasn’t gone forever! Mikkel just had to wait for his stupid leg to heal so that he could go back to the caves and figure out what Jonas did in there so that he could _go home!_  
  
But his second instinct was helplessness.  
  
Could he even figure out the secret of the caves? What if Jonas had done something, to make it impossible for Mikkel to return? What if his father and mother rejected him again?  
  
And…  
  
He had seen how his fath- _Ulrich’s_ family had been destroyed by Mads’s disappearance, and he dreaded to think what had happened to his own family, to his mother and his father and his brother and his sister.  
  
They must have been devastated.  
  
Wouldn't it be easier? If they didn’t exist, if they never existed, if Mikkel really was a little bit crazy… if his home was really gone forever, then what was the point in trying to go back?  
  
Mikkel shivered.  
  
Ines looked at him questioningly. It was a sunny day.  
  
Mikkel… _Michael_ slowly leaned into her, and felt rather than heard her take in a quick breath.  
  
“Yes,” he said softly. “I suppose it is.”

* * *

_Why am I here?  
  
Why has Jonas abandoned me?  
  
Why has God made such a huge mistake? _.  
  
“God doesn’t err,” Mama Ines said when he asked about the last one. “He has a plan. For each of us.”  
  
Michael still wasn’t sure how he felt about God, but he went to Mass once a week anyway. It made Mama Ines happy, so an hour a week was worth it.  
  
He started talking to Hannah more. Something about her bothered him. Every time he saw her, his stomach got all fluttery, and Michael wasn’t sure why, until one day they were sitting on his bed together, and she leaned over and kissed him.  
  
_Oh_.  
  
Despite his brain screaming at him, that _this was Jonas’s mother and she was married to somebody else and you’re going to make this timeline even more wrong than it already is_ , Michael kissed her back.  
  
“Do you want to have sex?” Hannah asked, pulling back from the kiss, and Michael, shocked, immediately and violently shook his head.  
  
“My mother,” he said lamely, when she looked surprised. “I can’t– I have to wait until marriage.”  
  
She had smiled, then, and said “Well, I guess I’ll have to marry you quickly, then,” and then she stood up and walked out of the bedroom, leaving Michael to stare after her.

* * *

The wedding was beautiful. _Hannah_ was beautiful.  
  
Katharina and Ulrich were there, looking on with smiles. Michael had been torn between laughing and crying when he saw their names on the guest list. It looked like his parents would be attending his wedding, after all.  
  
But as Ulrich and Katharina grew older, Michael started seeing more and more of his parents in them. They developed the same mannerisms, the same way of speech, the same styles. The only problem was that he was recognizing those same changes in his wife, too. Hannah was becoming more and more familiar, and what that meant terrified him.

* * *

Michael hated hospitals. They were only painful reminders of what had happened to him. He couldn’t even smell antiseptic without triggering an anxiety attack.  
  
But he had to be here. Not out of a sense of duty or an obligation, but out of love.  
  
He would never want to miss the birth of his child.  
  
Hannah was screaming, clutching Michael’s hand and cursing him out, and Michael was gamely going along, agreeing that _yes, it was all his fault, he did this to her_ and _of course, this is the last time_ and _just a little longer, just hold out a little longer…_  
  
His wife’s screams were suddenly joined by a thin shrieking noise, and Michael lurched up from his seat, breaking the tight hold Hannah had on his hand.  
  
He barely heard the nurse saying _“It’s a boy!”_ and his wife’s exhausted acknowledgement. He only had eyes for his baby.  
  
“Jonas,” Hannah managed, still breathing hard. “I want to name him Jonas. Jonas Kahnwald.”  
  
_Jonas Kahnwald._  
  
Michael couldn’t breathe.  
  
“Congratulations,” a nurse smiled, and handed the screaming baby to Michael.  
  
Through blurred vision, Michael looked down into the scrunched up face of his son– his _son!_ – and thought of another boy, with a yellow raincoat and an easy smile and ultimate fist bumps.  
  
He tried to pretend that the tears were those of joy, when Hannah asked later.  
  
Years ago, in a lonely hospital room, Mikkel had supposed that he had created an alternate dimension by traveling in time; one that he was now stuck in. One dimension had Mikkel, who lived in 2019 and disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and the other dimension had Michael, who lived in 1986 and appeared under mysterious circumstances. But now, in another hospital room, this one filled with nurses and his weary but smiling wife, another possibility occurred to Michael.  
  
Was he always meant to travel back in time? Was he just trapped in an endless loop? What had happened to _his_ Jonas’s father?  
  
God, _what had happened to Jonas’s father?_

* * *

Jonas was the light of Michael’s world.  
  
His baby boy, his teeny tiny son. Jonas Kahnwald. Michael even showed him some long-abandoned magic tricks, ones that made the baby shriek with delight and Hannah smile.  
  
During the long nights, when Jonas cried and cried and Hannah begged Michael to _please, please, Michael, just TAKE HIM_ , Michael would whisper Bible verses and jokes and half-forgotten stories to his son.  
  
He even told him about the journey to the caves, one night when Jonas was particularly squirmy and Michael was feeling braver than usual.  
  
“I’m never going to leave you,” Michael whispered into his baby’s hair when he finished. “I swear, you will never know the pain of losing your world. Never. I love you, Jonas.”  
  
Jonas, finally calm, babbled to himself and nuzzled into Michael’s shoulder. Michael pressed his nose to his son’s head and breathed in the baby scent.  
  
“You aren’t my Jonas Kahnwald,” he said quietly. “You’re _you_. And you are perfect. Never believe anything else.”  
  
Jonas burbled and giggled and, eventually, fell asleep as Michael paced around the room.  
  
The first time Jonas looked at him and said “I love you, Daddy,” Michael knew that everything, _everything_ had been worth it.  
  
_I would do anything for you, my son. Anything. All you have to do is ask._

* * *

As the Winden of 2019 started to take shape around him, Michael began to feel more and more dread at the prospect of running into his own younger self. As Jonas grew and his features began to take on a haunting familiarity, Mikkel found himself retreating farther and farther inside of himself.  
  
He stopped going to Mass.  
  
He stopped going to the grocery store.  
  
He even stopped visiting the main square. The paint shop was too close to the magic shop.  
  
And then Katharina announced a pregnancy. Her third. Magnus and Martha were all smiles, so excited to have another sibling. When Hannah had told him the news, Michael had had an anxiety attack, the worst one he’d had in a long, long time.  
  
Hannah didn’t understand why he stayed inside all day long. He longed to explain, to tell her everything, but… she wouldn’t understand. She couldn’t. Not even Mama Ines could understand.  
  
There was a nauseous feeling in his stomach, something that tugged at him. And, surprisingly, it had nothing to do with Jonas’s original father. It had to do with the trip to France. Jonas wouldn’t know French. Neither Michael nor Hannah spoke it. It wasn’t taught at the school. Duolingo only went so far, and besides, Michael couldn’t recall his Jonas ever showing any interest in language learning, but of course, he was going off of thirty-year old memories.  
  
So why had he suddenly taken a months-long break to go to France?  
  
He knew. Michael knew that he knew.  
  
A reclusive father, showing all the outward signs of depression, abruptly vanishing. A sudden trip to France, without any knowledge of French. The other Jonas’s staring eyes. The conversations that were suddenly hushed when Mikkel walked in. The way his father had whisked the obituaries into the recycling when Mikkel had asked for some newspaper to do a magic trick.  
  
But he wouldn’t. Perhaps in the other world Michael Kahnwald was willing to leave his son and his wife alone. But not in this one.  
  
Michael Kahnwald would never leave his family behind again.  
  
Never.  
  
But Mikkel Nielsen had learned a long time ago that life was cruel.

* * *

Of course, Michael was stunned when Jonas offered him an Ultimate Fist Bump.  
  
But mostly, he was horrified.  
  
Because that meant that Mikkel’s misfortune hadn’t created an alternate timeline.  
  
And the other Michael Kahnwald… the one who had vanished… but he hadn’t vanished, had he?  
  
As Jonas explained that he had come back to prevent a suicide by hanging, which _Jonas had witnessed_ , Michael felt like he was already being strangled.  
  
Here was the truth, the terrible truth that he had long suspected, that he had danced around, that he hid from, for almost thirty-three years, here it was, and it was at last confronting him.  
  
There was no other world.  
  
He and the other Michael Kahnwald were one and the same.  
  
He was always meant to travel back to the eighties. He was always meant to father Jonas. He was always meant to have panic attacks and miss his family and be unable to ever hug his mother, ever again. Little Mikkel, the one who seemed so young and so distant and so untouchable and so _happy_ , would one day become Michael Kahnwald, and so the cycle would continue.  
  
The other Jonas, the one who had been his friend, the one who had stranded him, the one with the solemn face but a charming smile, the one who offered fist bumps and then betrayed him in the same night, that Jonas was _his_ Jonas, his baby boy.  
  
Jonas was _sobbing_ , and Michael couldn’t make it better. All he could do was hug his son and wonder why the world was so merciless, why he would have to leave his family twice over.  
  
As Michael signed the note and fitted the noose around his neck, he took a moment and thought about Hannah, her bright eyes and beautiful smile. He thought about his son, and the way light seemed to pour out of his every expression.  
  
He would always regret going into the caves, but he would never regret Jonas.  
  
Michael thought of Jonas and Hannah and Mama Ines and Magnus and Martha and Mom and Dad and all of their wonderful personalities and quirks and mannerisms, and he thought of the years that he would never get to see and the lives that he would never get to witness and how he would never get to attend a million joys and sadnesses and failures and that everything was so fucking unfair, and before he could second-guess himself, before he could back down, before he could picture his son’s desperate face one last time, Michael kicked away the chair and–

* * *

A lonely soul, destined to wander through time, to live a tortured existence with only a few bright spots of light. Such is the life of a pawn in an intricate web that spans time and worlds. Mikkel’s disappearance, and Michael’s existence? A small part of a huge cancer, one that was so much greater than he could imagine.  
  
Michael, Mikkel, whoever he was, he died, would die, and is dying, of his own hand, and he would never know the answer to his biggest question of all, the one that triggered the anxiety attacks, the one that kept him up at night, the one that pummelled him at every turn, the one that he silently screamed into the black void of stars when both of his families were asleep.  
  
_Why?_

**Author's Note:**

> So… this is A Departure from what I normally do…  
> I just really wanted to write Dark fanfic but am TERRIFIED of messing with the timeline… so here, have a canon-compliant fic. :)  
> I tried to go through the story and take any egregious Americanisms out (at once point, the word “y’all” was in there, so I did catch the worst of it), but I most DEFINITELY left some in there, so if that bothers you, let me know and I will do my best to fix it!
> 
> Please let me know what you think!


End file.
